The Inevitability of Success

When someone has achieved a level of success, we often act as if that were the inevitable outcome. We behave as if it were a given. They were always going to succeed. Even history books are often written with a sense of inevitability about the great achievements and victories.

We seem to forget that while a person strives for success, failure is always a real possibility. In fact, that person may well have met failure several times before they met with success. The big thing is that they were driven to keep going till they achieved their goal.

Yes, luck will have had its part to play. Yet, more importantly, that person overcame their fears and doubts. It's often YOU that holds YOU back. It's not that successful people don't have negative inner voices, it's just that winners tell those negative voices to 'shut up!' They also took risks, sometimes enormous risks. Again, sometimes they will have had people who supported them, equally they will have met un-supportive and even downright obstructive people.

The point is that those people who achieved that success that now seems an inevitable part of history couldn't know that their success was inevitable. They couldn't, because it wasn't. People become successful by having a dream, daring to carry it out, planning how to do it and working very hard to achieve it. No magic wand, I’m afraid. They just wanted it more, and worked for it more. In fact, they took these risks and made all these efforts not to even achieve success, but for the possibility of success.

Success is not inevitable. It’s not a ‘sure thing’. In fact, it can even appear to be highly unlikely at times. Yet the chance of striving to achieve success has got to be far, far better than the alternatives. Hasn't it?